A variety of online services may retrieve videos from a source, such as a video sharing web site or a service that delivers videos to an application on a user device. The online services may distribute the videos to users who access the online services. For example, blog web sites, social networking web sites, and the like, may host videos in order to augment the content that the web sites already provide.
The videos may be sourced from users of the video sharing web site, or from publishers of content. The videos may be produced and captured in a large variety of formats and conditions. The videos may be professionally produced via, high definition technology, or alternatively, captured via a user's personal camcorder device. Thus, the quality of the video may differ from source to source.
The source of the video may upload the video in a raw data form. Often times, the raw data may contain various video attributes that may cause the video to be presented in a degraded manner.
Further, once the videos are uploaded, the videos may be transcoded. Transcoding is the process of converting a digital file into a digital file of a different format. The transcoding into various formats may be performed to ensure that the videos are in a format compatible with a variety of video player applications and user devices.
The uploaded video may contain interlacing. An interlaced video is designed to be captured, transmitted, or stored, and displayed in the same interlaced format. Because each frame of an interlaced video is composed of two fields that are captured at different moments in time, interlaced video frames will exhibit motion artifacts known as “interlacing effects”, or “combing”, if the recorded objects are moving fast enough to be in different positions when each individual field is captured, These artifacts may be more visible when the interlaced video is displayed at a slower speed than it was captured or when still frames are presented.
Interlaced videos introduce a phenomena called interline twitter. The interline twitter may show up when the subject being shot contains vertical detail that approaches the horizontal resolution of the video format. For instance, a person on television wearing a shirt with fine dark and light stripes may appear on a video monitor as if the stripes on the shirt are “twittering”.
Interlacing effects described above may cause the digital reproduction of videos to become frustrated. For example, if a user uploads a video to the video storing web site, and the video is subsequently accessed by another user, if the combing artifacts exist in the video, the other user may not be able to clearly watch the video, or the other user's experience may be lessened due to the distraction caused by the interlaced artifacts.
In addition to the interlace issues discussed above, several other phenomena may occur or be included in the uploaded video, such as video blocking. Video blocking is caused by the uploaded videos having blocked borders around an active portion of the video. If a video is uploaded with video blocking, and then subsequently viewed, the blocking may prevent the video from being displayed at a maximum size. This may occur because significant resources on a video player may be devoted to reproducing the blocked borders.
A video sharing web site may host numerous videos. For example, as the video sharing web site becomes more popular, the number of videos uploaded to the video sharing web site may reach the millions, if not more.
Further, the video sharing web site as discussed above may be relied upon to transcode the videos into numerous formats. This may be performed because the video sharing web site's videos may be shared through various services. A blogging web site may display a high quality, data intensive version of the video. Conversely, the social networking web site may display a low quality, compressed version of the video.
Additionally, the video sharing web site, and the videos sourced from the video sharing web site, may be accessed by a variety of user devices, such as a personal computer, tablet, or smart phone. Thus, the videos sourced from the video sharing web site may be displayed and transcoded in various formats based on the user device employed to access the videos.